Ever since Lyra Silvertongue and her dæmon, Pantalaimon, had been reunited, following their terrible parting on the shores of the world of the dead, Lyra had wanted to ask him about the time he’d spent away from her. But she had the obscure sense that she shouldn’t ask him directly; he would tell her when he wanted to. However, time went past, and still he didn’t, and it began to trouble her.
This feeling came to a head during a visit she paid to the northern lands, a year after the witch Yelena Pazhets had nearly killed her in Oxford: the time when Lyra had been saved by the birds.
The curse of Bolvangar had been lifted, but the northern lands had still not recovered from the climatic devastation Lord Asriel had caused. However, the retreat of the snows and the loosening of the permafrost meant that all kinds of archaeological work was possible, and Jordan College sponsored a dig in the region of Trollesund to investigate some recently discovered settlements of the Proto-Fisher people.
Naturally, Lyra demanded to go too; but they made her work. So she slept in a tent and spent days sifting through the squalid rubbish in a mud-filled midden, while Pantalaimon snapped at mosquitoes; and as soon as the chance came, she begged a ride on the weekly supply-run into the town. She wanted to look at the places she remembered: the sledge depot where she’d bargained with Iorek Byrnison, the dockside where she’d met Lee Scoresby, and the house of the witch consul Dr. Lanselius.
“Two hours, Lyra,” said Duncan Armstrong, the graduate student who was driving the tractor, as they drew up outside the General Post Office. “If you’re not here at three o’clock precisely, I’ll go without you.”
“You don’t trust us,” she said.
“Two hours.”
The sledge depot was empty and derelict, but she found Einarsson’s Bar, where in the yard next to the alley she’d had her first sight of an armoured bear, and watched Iorek swallowing a gallon of raw spirits and heard him speak of his captivity. The yard looked just the same, with a rusty shack leaning over in a sea of mud. The docks, though, looked very different: the buildings she remembered were half underwater, and new cranes and warehouses had had to be set up further back.
“It’s a mess,” said Pantalaimon severely.
“Everything’s a mess. Let’s see if Dr. Lanselius is in.”
The consul represented the interests of all the witch-clans, even those who were feuding. Lyra wasn’t sure if he’d remember their first meeting, and Pan scoffed.
“Not remember us?” he said. “Of course he will!”
“When we first came I’d have been sure no one could forget us,” she agreed. “But now…I’m not so sure about things.”
But he did. Dr. Lanselius was at his door, saying goodbye to a Muscovite amber merchant, and as soon as he saw Lyra and her dæmon he greeted her warmly and showed her into the narrow elegant wooden house.
“Lyra Silvertongue, you’re very welcome,” he said. “Yes, I know your new name. Serafina Pekkala told me everything about your exploits. Will you take some coffee?”
“Thank you,” she said. “She told you everything?”
“Everything she knew.”
“Like…me and Pan being able to…”
Dr. Lanselius smiled.
“Ah,” she said, and she and Pan relaxed. It was something they had to be on their guard about all the time. If Dr. Lanselius knew they could separate, there was no need for Pantalaimon to pretend he couldn’t leave Lyra’s side; and with the consul’s permission he leaped out through the open window to explore the garden.
Dr. Lanselius brought the coffee pot and cups into the little parlour, and Lyra asked at once, before Pan came back:
“You know when witches are young, and they do what Pan and I did, they go apart…”
“I know a little. Every witch has to go through it, or not live a full witch-life. There are some who can’t, or who won’t, and their sisters pity them, though those who can’t do it pity themselves more. Their lives are not happy.”
“What do they do? Where does it happen?”
“In central Siberia there is a region of devastation. Thousands of years ago there was a prosperous city there, the centre of an empire of craftsmen and traders that reached from Novgorod to Mongolia. But they made war with the spirit world, and their capital was destroyed by a blast of fire. Nothing has lived there since—plant, insect, bird or mammal.”
Lyra thought she knew what the spirit world meant. It meant another universe, like Will’s, or like the world of Cittàgazze. If there had been contact between this universe and another, thousands of years ago, long before the way of cutting through from one universe to another with the subtle knife had been invented, that was very interesting and she wanted to know more; but she reined in her interest quickly, because she didn’t want to alert Pan.
She knew exactly where he was and what he was doing, and she didn’t want him to stop it. Just at that moment he was investigating the rack of cloud-pine branches outside the consul’s house, and trying to divine which of them belonged to Serafina Pekkala’s clan, because he had the idea that if he and Lyra tried really hard, they might eventually be able to bypass the alethiometer and discover things by mental power alone. Lyra thought this was crazy, but she was glad he was concentrating on it, because she didn’t want him to overhear her questions to Dr. Lanselius.
“So the witches—the young witches go there with their dæmons, before they’re able to separate, and the witches go into this devastated place and the dæmons are afraid to?”
“As I understand it, yes.”
Nothing would soften Lyra’s memory of the moment she had done a similar thing to Pantalaimon. As she remembered his terrified whimpering puppy-form crouching on the jetty, she felt hot tears of guilt brimming in her eyes, and she could hardly speak. She swallowed several times and said:
“When…after the…when they’ve gone across, and they’ve found their dæmons again…do they talk about it? Do their dæmons tell them what they did when they were apart?”
The witch consul was a shrewd man. His broad and florid face was not expressive, because he had trained himself to be diplomatically non-committal; but he knew when to allow his eyes the animation of sympathy.
“Don’t laugh at me,” Lyra said, and outside in the mud Pantalaimon pricked up his pine-marten ears.
Dr. Lanselius’s own dæmon, a slender serpent, flowed from his shoulder down to the floor, and in a moment or two—the room was not a large one—she had climbed to the window sill. Both Lyra and the consul were watching her, and when Dr. Lanselius sensed something and relaxed, she felt the change in his attention and looked at him.